Big ideas for 2011: The Wired Ideas Special

This article was taken from the December issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional
content bysubscribing online

Wired has trawled infospace to bring you the concepts
and theories that will shape your thoughts next
year.

1 Cloudliving If the 20th century was about keeping up with the
Joneses, the 21st is about linking up with them. Partly due to the
economy, partly because of a fundamental cultural shift in how we
think about resources, more and more people are choosing "shared"
over "owned" in diverse areas from music to devices to farmland.
Welcome to the age of cloudliving.

Increasingly, we can have more by owning less -- because, as
wired US "senior maverick" and futurist Kevin Kelly wrote in a
January 2009 essay, "access is better than ownership". Our
audiovisual appetites are beginning to surpass the capacity of our
hard drives and even our ability to consume those media. (How many
songs in your iTunes library have a play count of one or even
zero?) Services such as Spotify and Pandora are outsourcing our
media libraries to the cloud, streaming music rather than offering
downloads. Blinkbox, Hulu and Boxee do the same for TV and film, as
do Amazon and LoveFilm video-on-demand streaming offerings.

With NeighborGoods, ShareSomeSugar and SnapGoods in the US, you
can lend and borrow everything from hammocks to household
appliances within a community, be that a neighbourhood, block
of flats, campus, office or online. In the UK, Landshare connects
aspiring produce growers with landowners who have the growing space
but don't use it, allowing urbanites to tend gardens and orchards.
GiftFlow lets you trade misguided gifts from well-meaning friends
for presents someone else doesn't want but you do. Telecommuting
tools such as Skype and Apple's FaceTime are even taking our office space to the
cloud.

Car-sharing is gaining increasing traction, and bikesharing - a
long time pipe dream for many cities -- is becoming an urban
reality. Services such as Streetcar, Car Sharing Club and Zipcar
offer members 24/7 access to thousands of vehicles. In Paris, the
Vélib system has been propelling the city's freewheeling
two-wheelers since 2007, inspiring London's own ambitious
bikesharing programme that already draws an estimated 500,000 rides
per day.

So what's next? If the singularity is anywhere in sight, we may
one day even be able to cloudsource our entire minds, tapping a
neighbour's piano-playing skills for a concerto or a colleague's
perfect German for an impromptu conversation in Frankfurt.
Maria Popova

2Ambient thought fusion Touch can unconsciously influence our thoughts. So says
Josh Ackerman, a psychologist from the Sloan School of Management
at MIT. In a series of studies, Ackerman noticed that many
metaphors related to physical properties. When we consider the
"gravity of the situation", for example, there is an implication of
seriousness. His team wondered if it could reverse the metaphor:
can physical properties alter opinions? Its experiments, published
in Science, found that, when participants experienced the feel of
sandpaper, they perceived social interactions as having gone less
smoothly. Sitting on an unpadded chair encouraged people to drive a
hard bargain. "As long as people are unaware of these tactile
influences," says Ackerman, "individuals and companies that are
aware can control environments to shape behaviour." Vaughan
Bell

3 Utilitainment A new wave of technology is marrying utility with
entertainment. Bayer's Didget device (right) encourages diabetic
children to consent to regular pin-prick blood-sugar tests. It
links to the Nintendo DS and rewards consistent testing with points
and new levels. Waze is a GPS iPhone app that makes commuting fun
by providing real-time traffic updates and geogaming elements.
"Wazers" can alert other users to traffic, police traps and
speed-cams. Sustainability is also a growth area. Workplace
platform GreenNuture has social-gaming elements to rank and reward
employees for eco-aware behaviour. So pwning Gareth from accounts
might just save the world. Olivia Solon

4 Biorhythm syncing The key to productivity isn't time management, says Tony
Schwartz of New York's The Energy Project and author of the 2010
book The Way We're Working Isn't Working. Rather it's biorhythm
syncing.

We're not capable of working at the same flatout rate at all
times, so getting things done isn't a matter of scheduling, but
rather one of paying attention to our energy levels. Schwartz
writes: "We're most productive when we move between expending
energy and intermittently renewing our four energy needs:
sustainability (physical), security (emotional), self-expression
(mental) and significance (spiritual)." Regular breaks are
essential, he says, with true physical exercise, quality nutrition,
meditation and mid-afternoon naps among the keys to a good life.
Schwartz's conclusions come from years of studies into peak
performance by organisations such as Nasa. Ben Hammersley

5 Illness prestige Patients like to think they're all treated equally, but
research conducted at the University of Oslo (published in Social
Science & Medicine) found that doctors recognise an implicit
ranking of diseases. The implications for personal care are clear,
but the knock-on effects for the funding of medical research are
largely unknown. Suicide, one of the biggest killers in the West,
draws only a fraction of the funding that supports research into
more prestigious but less deadly maladies. Vaughan
Bell